Network service providers want to understand flow of communications traffic and traffic flow changes over the network for purposes of capacity planning, marketing and other reasons. For example, it is important to know if traffic through a gateway is increasing, in order to know whether routers should be added to the gateway. It may also be helpful to know whether traffic from a particular customer, such as an Internet service provider (ISP), is increasing or decreasing to understand how to provide better service to the ISP. Some tools, such as sFlow and Netflow, are available that attempt to provide information about traffic flow by sampling packet data through IP networks.
For example, a Netflow agent running on a router can provide data such as packet source IP address, destination IP address and port numbers. In addition to these, the autonomous system (AS) may be identified by a sFlow agent. Because currently available tools gather traffic flow information at a packet level, these tools obtain relatively low-level information such as source or destination IP addresses. However, these tools are unable to provide information such the city or ISP that the packets are originating from or going to. As such, currently available traffic analysis tools are not capable of providing a view of traffic flow or changes in traffic flow as it relates to other business aspects of the network service provider.
It is with respect to these and other problems that embodiments of the present invention have been created.